IEEE Technology and Society Magazine - September 2017 - 56

Change
Is Afoot
Applying Change Management
Theories to Self-Organizing
Socio-Technical Systems
Jan-Philipp Steghöfer

Era of the Participatory Self-Organizing
Socio-Technical System

S

ocio-technical systems are here to stay.
They are going to become more important
and more engrained in our daily lives.
Even the relatively mundane examples we
see these days have transformed the way
we communicate, look up, and share
knowledge, and the ways we choose
our restaurants, our rides, and our vacations. Computersupported cooperative work is already transforming the
workplace. Personal health and fitness applications allow us to observe our bodies and share this information within a social network that provides both praise
and control. Larger-scale solutions are right around the
corner. The technical feasibility of such systems is no
longer under debate. Users seem to be willing to give
up their data and at least some control for the benefits
these socio-technical systems undoubtedly bring.
The socio-technical systems we currently see, however, can be assigned to two categories: those that consist
purely of software agents, i.e., autonomous pieces of
software making choices on behalf of organizations or
individuals; and those systems that integrate their users
Digital Object Identifier 10.1109/MTS.2017.2728735
Date of publication: 7 September 2017

56

1932-4529/17©2017IEEE

more closely and allow, e.g., the formation of groups or
interactions between human users, within the system.
Systems in the first category (software agents) work
mostly in the background, such as algorithmic trading
systems or the systems that control our power networks. These certainly have an influence on society, but
they are closed and shielded from laymen. Examples in
the latter category are social networks, crowd-funding
platforms, or ride-sharing applications. In these cases,
users can interact in certain ways, but the company running the platform defines what can and cannot be done
on the platform, which content users will see, which
freedoms users will have to engage and interact, and
how the platform as a whole evolves in response to new
requirements and user needs.
Such systems are soon to be complemented by a
new breed: participatory self-organizing socio-technical
systems. In these self-organizing systems, users are no
longer confined to roles as passive adherents to rules
and structure, but can actively change the existing rules
and the existing structures to adapt the system to their
needs or to new environments as part of a self-organization process. A prominent example for such a participatory

IEEE TECHNOLOGY AND SOCIETY MAGAZINE

∕

SEPTEMBER 2017



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